I am very pleased to announce version 2 of the AJAX APIs Playground. For those of you not familiar with it, the Playground is an educational application designed to show interactive code samples for some of Google's coolest Javascript APIs. Of the new changes, the most obvious is the sweet new UI, thanks to help from Roman Nurik of the Google Earth team.

The new features are:

* Break points (simulated in Javascript)

* Firebug Lite in output for debugging

* Line numbers in code editor

* Ability to edit HTML of samples

The breakpoints and Firebug Lite additions are my favorite new features. But why did I include Firebug Lite when all web developers (should!) have Firebug installed? Because when code runs on the Playground, it runs in an iFrame. That iFrame does not have the Firebug object initialized in it. Since it is a cross-domain iFrame, there's no simple way to add Firebug to the iFrame's window object, so adding Firebug Lite was the best approach. This makes it so you can now use all of your favorite Firebug debugging convenience functions in the Playground!

To use Firebug Lite and breakpoints, simply click on the line number you want to add a breakpoint to and hit "Debug Code". This will insert Firebug Lite into the output and pause the execution on the breakpoint line number until you to click the play button to continue. Try adding a breakpoint to a line, clicking "Debug Code", then opening Firebug Lite and typing in a variable name to inspect the contents/value of the variable at that point in the code.

"LocalSearch with Markers (http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?exp=localsearch#localsearch_with_markers)" in the google code playground website shows the search query for a a LAT and LONG provided in the map setcenter position. What I am trying to do are two things, first let the map find the current location of the user and then show the near by location and also the the search result I want to be able to display it anywhere in the site?How would i achieve that? Thanks for the assistance!